In the past, potato "chips" or "crisps" have been formed in random sizes and shapes and have been sold in bags, such as cellophane bags. Packaging of potato chips in this way requires a relatively large amount of space to contain a relatively small weight of potato chips, and the potato chips frequently become broken and crushed when any weight or force is applied to the exterior of the bag.
The newer type "potato chips" are of substantially uniform size and shape and are manufactured by mixing potato flour and other elements together, forming the mixture in a continuous flat sheet, moving the sheet toward a cooker, cutting out the oblong shapes from the sheet and then submerging the shapes into hot oil which cooks the chips. The chips tend to float in the hot oil and move up into contact with the transporting conveyor, causing the chips to curve around the shape of the conveyor, so that when the chips emerge from the oil they are substantially uniformly shaped with an eliptical outside edge, a concave face, and with one rectilinear dimension. The uniformity of shape and size of the new style potato chip allows a multiple number of the chips to be stacked in a nested relationship in a line, and the chips can be wrapped in this dense configuration in a soft package or inserted into a hard canister, etc. The package formed by the uniformly shaped, nested potato chips is much smaller in size and more densely packed than the old style bagged random shaped chips.
While the uniformity of size and shape in the new type potato chip is advantageous from a packaging standpoint, the procedures for wrapping or packaging the potato chips still requires a substantial amount of hand labor. For instance, the potato chips are typically moved to a large work table in several rows of shingle stacked chips, and several people at the work table are required to gather the potato chips and transfer them to a conveyor which includes upstanding pins at spaced intervals along its length which holds the potato chips in "slugs" or groups that can be separately packaged. The manual step of gathering and then transferring the potato chips to the conveyor results in each package of potato chips having a different number of chips in the package. Moreover, a substantial amount of potato chip breakage is experienced in the manual transfer procedure, and if a package is overfilled or underfilled, breakage of the chips is likely to occur in the package.